Lygia Pape

A sculptor, engraver and filmmaker, Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004) began her career within the Grupo Frente movement in Rio de Janeiro, influenced by her training with Fayga Ostrower at the Rio Museum of Modern Art school. She conceived the idea of “weaving space” as a form of perception that becomes a living interaction. Thus, her luminous installations, square reliefs and experimental films, as presented at the Bourse de Commerce, are staged not as finished objects but as immersive experiences.

Cofounder of Neo-Concrete art in Brazil, Lygia Pape (1927–2004) helped spearhead the transition of two-dimensional abstract art into three-dimensional sculpture and sensory, participatory fabric works, alongside Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. This volume appraises her career, from her early Concrete art of the 1940s to her famous Book of Creation and films, and includes documents published here for the first time.
Pape's work spans five decades and two repressive dictatorships in Brazil (1937–45 and 1964–85), as well as an incredibly fertile period of cultural and economic awakening. Across these historical eras, Pape developed an abstract-concrete formal language as well as experimental explorations of space that also accommodated poetic manifestations of subtle resistance. This 448-page volume describes an arc of continual creative and political engagement, with a consistent emphasis on the affirmations of the sensual and the shared.

A founding member of Brazil’s Neoconcrete movement, Lygia Pape (1927–2004) pioneered a unique approach to abstraction and valued art that favored the primacy of viewers’ sensorial experiences. This catalog, published on the occasion of Lygia Pape’s solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York in fall 2018, brings together a variety of works from the artist’s rich oeuvre, from sculptures, prints and paintings to installations and films. It focuses particularly on the series Tecelares (1952–59), Ttéias (2003) and Amazoninos (1989–2003). Designed by Damien Saatdjian, the publication includes a 2009 conversation between Pape’s daughter Paula Pape, curator Paulo Herkenhoff and poet Ferreira Gullar, as well as a newly commissioned text by art historian Alexander Alberro that explores multisensorial art with a focus on the works surveyed here.

A founding member of Brazil's Neo-Concrete movement, Lygia Pape (1927–2004) made art that favored the primacy of the viewer's sensorial experience. Pape's geometric abstractions explore rich territory through sculpture, drawing, engraving, filmmaking and installation. This publication brings together works spanning 1955 to 2001. The precise incised lines of Pape's Tecelares woodcut prints and drawings of the 1950s and '60s marry pure geometry with organic patterns. Her subsequent Ttéia installations (begun in the late 1970s and continued throughout her career) present captivating explorations of geometry, space and materiality. Installation views and detail shots of these works complement texts by Briony Fer and Daniel Birnbaum, two ardent followers of Pape's work.